“I love the process of digital story creation. These stories force you to reflect on your life journey. Digital stories are really empowering tools of discovery and students can illuminate this in a multi-modal way using images, audio, text, and beyond. You really are drawn into the student’s important moments of change and emotion is the connecting glue. Emotion bridges the gap between storyteller and audience.” -Brianna Derr, Instructional Technologist Specializing in Video
Students also learn how to communicate off the page and onto the screen. The challenge for anyone creating a digital story for the first time is to learn how to tell individual stories with audio, narration, and visuals and then bring them all together to tell one cohesive story. It’s challenging but when you discover how to articulate this, there is a sense of empowerment.
For Professor Sue Ellen Henry’s course Multiculturalism and Education, she asked her students to create digital stories of identify. In this particular case, a digital story is defined as a moment or event that is responsible for shaping or changing your life. It is told through the “I” narrative and contains an element of emotion. This is what students were asked to reflect on, in regards to identity. I interviewed Professor Henry about her incorporation of digital stories and digital pedagogy into her course and here’s what she had to say:
I hoped that students would leave the project with a deeper sense for how the identity marker they chose to explore influences the life they lead. Constructing this “deeper sense” meant activating and working with the emotional resonance of the critical moment and using the emotions surrounding the situation to connect to a public viewing audience. In this way, I hoped students would see their work not only as autobiographical but also as a kind of media to send a message to others. Students are very familiar with being consumers of media; I wanted them to experience being a producer of media that mattered to them.
3. What were some challenges of digital storytelling process?
The main thing that was hard was giving up something else I had historically done in this class to make room for this project. You can’t do everything; something had to go. This was a hard decision of preferring some pedagogical outcomes over others.
4. What were some pleasant discoveries of the digital storytelling process?
Getting close to students, through all the dialogue and revision of the project, was an unanticipated joy. Seeing them listening and watching intently to one another’s stories, offering their kind reinforcements about what worked, what connected with them as audience members, was just beautiful.
Digital stories are so important for the 21st century student. They are learning how media influences them to feel a certain way and how you can manipulate emotions with images, audio, and effects and when they discover that, they are ready to become producers of their own media. “I really enjoyed learning about this technology and it made me feel like I have more to say with regard to visual rhetoric and digital media literacy.”-Professor Sue Ellen Henry
5. Can you talk a little bit about the integration of technology into this course. How did the technology play a role in your pedagogy.
The technology offered the opportunity of exploring the rhetoric of visual and auditory content. These conversations offered students the chance to demonstrate their emotions and their experience in a more sophisticated way when compared to a flat paper. The technology never overtook the project, largely because it wasn’t too hard to learn, students were highly motivated to use the technology in an authentic way, and we had superior planning and support with our embedded technologist.
6. What would you say to someone who is considering digital storytelling in their course?
If your course has an element of emotion that you want to foreground, this is a terrific medium to use for assignments. It can help people make beautiful, provocative, timeless projects that speak to more than just the faculty member. Plan for it; drop something so that you can prioritize its integration in the course.
Below are 3 digital stories taken from Professor Henry’s EDUC 322: Multiculturalism & Education:
Direction of Snow
Welcome to America
The Cost of Being Tough